Rob Tripp's Blog: Cancrime, page 15

Ontario sex killer Wang granted full parole

Sex killer Guoxi Wang is getting full parole after 17 years behind bars, parole board records reveal. He will be deported to China immediately. Wang has been in a Canadian penitentiary since 1995, when he murdered Xiaoting Liu, 33. The two were housemates in Kingston, Ontario, and studying on student visas at Queen’s University, when Wang’s obsession with Liu drove him to kill her.

Wang admitted, at his sentencing a year later, that he was obsessed with Liu, who had a husband and young daughter in China. She had rebuffed his advances. He was sentenced to life in prison, with no chance of parole for 15 years. Wang rendered Liu unconscious, raped her and strangled her to death. He put her body in the refrigerator and called police, telling an operator: “I killed my housemate. I used my hands.” Wang thought he would be immediately deported and then executed in China. The Parole Board of Canada decision says that Wang, who had no criminal record before the murder, has been “polite and courteous” in prison, has completed a number of treatment programs, including sex offender therapy and shows what appears to be genuine remorse. Wang plans to live with his brother in China. Even if he is not subject to supervision there, the parole board concluded that he “would not present an undue risk to society.”

Here’s the full decision of the Parole Board, after the June 2012 hearing:

Sex killer Guoxi Wang release decision of Parole Board of Canada

» An excellent account of Wang’s sentencing in 1996, by former Whig-Standard reporter Jeff Outhit, is preserved here

Killer mother Tooba Yahya moved to Ontario prison

A mother of seven children who was convicted of  the “despicable” and “heinous” murder of three of those children and her husband’s first wife has begun serving her life sentence in a federal penitentiary in Kitchener, Ontario, Cancrime learned. Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 42, (inset) was quietly transferred recently to Grand Valley Institution, a 15-year-old federal facility for women who are serving sentences of two years or more. Yahya’s husband Mohammad Shafia, 58, and her eldest son Hamed, 21, were moved to maximum-security Kingston Penitentiary in Kingston, Ontario, last week, Cancrime revealed previously.

The three Shafias were convicted January 29 in a Kingston court of four counts of first-degree murder. Each was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years. Jurors found them guilty of  conspiring together in a diabolical plot that culminated with the slaying of four family members.

Shafia sisters, Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, were found dead June 30, 2009, inside the family’s Nissan Sentra that was discovered submerged at the bottom of the Rideau Canal at Kingston Mills, a lock station on the Rideau Canal in Kingston in eastern Ontario. Rona Amir Mohammad, 52, also was in the car. She was Shafia’s first wife, whom he married in his native Afghanistan before the polygamous family moved to Canada in 2007 and settled in Montreal.

All of the victims had drowned but examinations could not pinpoint where and how they drowned.

The three-month long trial revealed that Shafia was enraged because he felt his daughters had violated strict cultural rules about sexual modesty, they dressed in revealing clothes and they were disobedient. Mohammad wanted a divorce and supported the three girls in their pursuit of western lifestyles. She and Yahya clashed frequently and Mohammad wrote, in a diary entered as evidence, that she was abused, humiliated and isolated.

Tooba will be held in isolation at the overcrowded women’s prison in Kitchener because her status as a child killer will make her a target of death threats from other prisoners. Child murderers are despised by fellow prisoners and are accorded the lowest status in the jungle-like social order of prison life.

Grand Valley may have problems managing Tooba safely, prison sources tell me, because the facility already is badly overcrowded and because it was not designed to accommodate high-profile, maximum-security prisoners who require protection. Grand Valley opened in 1997 as a minimum-security facility. It has been renovated several times in the intervening years as corrections authorities realized they desperately needed more secure facilities for small numbers of violent and dangerous prisoners.

Judge Robert Maranger of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice condemned Tooba and her co-conspirators in a stinging rebuke delivered at the conclusion of the sensational three-month long trial.

“It is difficult to conceive of a more despicable, more heinous crime,” Maranger said, before he imposed the mandatory life sentences. “There is nothing more honourless than the deliberate murder of, in the case of Mohammad Shafia, three of his daughters and his wife, in the case of Tooba Yahya, three of her daughters and a stepmother to all her children, in the case of Hamed Shafia, three of sisters and a mother.

“The apparent reason behind these cold-blooded, shameful murders was that the four completely innocent victims offended your twisted notion of honor, a notion of honor that is founded upon the domination and control of women, a sick notion of honor that has absolutely no place in any civilized society.”

Tooba, Shafia and Hamed have all begun the process of appealing their convictions to the Ontario Court of Appeal.

Killer Shafia dad and son moved to Kingston Penitentiary

Convicted multiple murderers Mohammad Shafia and his son Hamed (inset) have been transferred to maximum-security Kingston Penitentiary in Kingston, Ontario, to begin serving their life sentences, prison sources have told Cancrime. The pair were each convicted January 29, along with Shafia’s second wife Tooba, of  four counts of first-degree murder, in the killing in 2009 of three of the family’s teenage daughters and Shafia’s first wife in the polygamous family. The two men were moved to KP, Canada’s oldest federal penitentiary, last week, according to my sources. Citing privacy laws, Corrections Canada does not release information about the placement of prisoners. The trio of murderers, Afghan immigrants who were living in Montreal, Quebec, had been in provincial custody since their convictions in a Kingston court last month.

The Shafias will need protection from other prisoners in 177-year-old Kingston Pen, primarily because they are convicted child killers. Child murderers are despised by other convicts and are considered the lowest of the low on the social pecking order in prisons. Many are targeted for attack, though most survive behind bars. The Shafias also could be targeted because of racial and ethnic hostility that simmers inside most of Canada’s penitentiaries. As Afghans, they will be considered outsiders and foreigners who are despised by some of the cliques inside the prison. The Shafias also could face threats because of the profile their case attracted. Other prisoners will view them as ‘celebrity convicts’ who attract unwelcome attention to the prison.

Shafia

Hamed, 21, and Shafia, 58, likely will be held in isolation, at least during the first years of their sentences. They will have limited contact with other prisoners. They also will undergo detailed assessments, as prison authorities seek to determine what risk they pose to other prisoners and to staff, whether they are suicidal and if they pose any escape risk.

The Shafias join some of Canada’s most notorious killers who are housed at Kingston Penitentiary, including former Canadian air force colonel and base commander Russell Williams, the sex killer who was shipped to the lakefront prison in October 2010, after his conviction for murdering two women in Ontario. Paul Bernardo, the sexual sadist who murdered two teenage girls and raped many other women, also is housed on a special isolation cellblock at Kingston Pen, because he needs protection from other inmates. Bernardo was assaulted soon after he arrived at Kingston Pen. Child killer Michael Briere calls Kingston Pen home, as does Rick Wills, a former Toronto police officer who murdered his mistress.

The Shafias were convicted of murdering four family members. Sisters, Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, were found dead June 30, 2009, inside the family’s Nissan Sentra that was discovered submerged at the bottom of the Rideau Canal at Kingston Mills, a lock station on the Rideau Canal in Kingston, in eastern Ontario. Rona Amir Mohammad, 52, also was in the car. She was Shafia’s first wife, whom he married in his native Afghanistan before the polygamous family moved to Canada in 2007 and settled in Montreal. All four victims had drowned. The trial heard that the killers incapacitated the victims, either by drowning them elsewhere or rendering them unconscious before placing them inside the Nissan and then pushing it into the canal.

Prosecutors established that Shafia orchestrated the mass killing because he was enraged that his daughters had shamed him by secretly dating and dressing in revealing clothes. Shafia’s first wife Rona wanted a divorce and could have exposed the the family’s polygamy, threatening their immigration status in Canada.

All three Shafias have given notice that they intend to appeal. They were automatically sentenced to life in prison, with no chance of parole for 25 years. It’s not known whether Tooba has been transferred to federal custody, though she may already have been moved to Grand Valley Institution, the only federal facility for women in Ontario.

» Read all of my coverage of the case